CASE STUDY - PEPSICO
Upskill your creatives – How PepsiCo uses AI to maximise effectiveness and share of attention at the point of sale
PepsiCo faced the critical challenge of capturing shoppers' attention at the point of sale. Their shopper marketing creatives lacked standardised tools and processes to maximise effectiveness. Traditional consumer research couldn't keep up with the growing demand for consistent evaluation due to time and budget constraints. Enter the game-changer: ACE (Agile Creative Evaluation) on the brainsuite platform. This AI testing platform quickly became an integral part of the shopper marketing process, rolled out in over 20 countries within a year.
Challenge
Karla Hormazabal (Director Global DX Commercial Innovation):
“At PepsiCo we are dedicated to winning at the point of sale. Capturing our shoppers attention is critical to our success. Our instore shopper marketing is the most important touchpoint to increase purchase intent and grow our brands. However, our shopper marketing creatives lacked standardised tools and processes to maximise their effectiveness.”
PepsiCo, with its hundreds of brands in the areas of soft drinks, chips and packaged foods, launches new shopper marketing activities worldwide almost every day. To establish a common understanding of effectiveness drivers and equip their shopper marketing teams to succeed at the point of sale, PepsiCo Labs and the Demand Accelerator team sought faster, better, and more efficient ways to improve the quality and impact of each activity. Although consumer research was already in use, it couldn't keep up with the growing demand for consistent creative evaluation due to timing and budget constraints.
PepsiCo needed an easy-to-use solution that could scale rapidly on a multinational level and integrate seamlessly with their existing insights platform and overarching brand strategy.
Solution
With ACE (Agile Creative Evaluation) on the brainsuite platform, PepsiCo now has the ability to predict how the human brain processes their creative ideas and their potential impact in the store environment. This is made possible through a combination of behavioral science, computer vision and deep learning models.
With an unlimited usage model, brainsuite enhances decision-making and optimisation throughout the entire creative process. From selecting between variants to making detailed improvements and finalising control, brainsuite ensures that each creative element, from key visuals to display units, fixture assets to static clings, delivers against key effectiveness drivers.
Using brainsuite is simple: upload the creative asset, specify key details such as brand name, intended message, regions of interest, and the intended location of the asset. Brainsuite processes the information and generates a detailed report within minutes. All testing data is stored within brainsuite, enabling analysis of creative effectiveness across various brands and touchpoints. Brainsuite also allows the combination of AI with the expertise of human professionals, who can be booked directly on the platform.
The results were not only used to inform the teams but laid the foundation for the new Superiority Growth Model, including a clear process, training and template, and the ongoing use of ACE results to evaluate Key Visual performance.
Impact
The AI creative testing platform has become an integral part of PepsiCo's shopper marketing creative testing process and has been successfully implemented in over 20 countries worldwide in less than a year.
Optimised creative assets based on the results show significantly higher purchase intent, stronger branding and improved response. With an objective, data-driven foundation and a clear decision-making framework, PepsiCo has reduced lengthy decision processes and subjective discussions.
Sally Groult (Shopper Marketing & Shopper Activation Director – France):
"We have been using the ACE solution for a couple of months now, and it has been a key enabler and a powerful tool to greatly enhance our shopper marketing capabilities."
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